OTTAWA—Monday mid-winter mornings bring their own special challenges, but for a particular shade of grim we can recommend Ottawa during a Monday morning snowstorm in January.

So it was with much glee that we learned that the leader of a vibrant G8 nation was going to spark our grey existence with a live-tweet of each twist and turn, victory and tragedy, of life at the top.

Except Stephen Harper’s day, as revealed, appeared to be about as mundane as anything I slogged through on the same day.

His commute was smoother, but I didn’t have the RCMP to help me navigate the puddles. His office is much larger than mine, he spent more time in meetings, but he also seemed to spend a lot more time alone.

I didn’t have Stanley the cat for company at breakfast or Charlie the chinchilla to greet me at the end of the day. Harper seemed somewhat amazed by a page carrying boxes of copy paper through the government lobby, but maybe I’ve just become cynical.

It looks like I had more fun Monday evening.

So we’ll call it a wash, and if the end game here was to show our leader was just a regular guy, score a victory for him and his office.

But if this was just the latest effort to try to humanize our prime minister, it must be scored as a noble effort at mission impossible.

Unbuttoning the most buttoned down prime minister in recent memory is a tall order. These efforts come in fits and starts, even though after seven years in the job, love him or loathe him, Canadians know the public persona of the man at the helm.

Drilling down to discover the real Stephen Harper is a little like diamond mining in the Arctic, labour intensive, lonely and often futile. A day of tweets won’t do the trick.

We weren’t expecting Berlusconi Bunga Bunga, but we were hoping for something more than Harper, by himself, at his desk.

We learned he has a Beatles mug, what appears to be a family portrait on his laptop, drinks Diet Coke out of a can and dined alone on fruit salad, a vegetable that might have been asparagus and his files at lunch while Idle No More protesters chanted near his front door.

The most revealing photo was his morning meeting with his inner circle, a gathering which seemed light on female representation and heavy on communications staff, while the Queen stared down at them, unamused.

Those close to Harper say the prime minister has decided to embrace social media, a technology which is less rigid, a lot more fun than a press release, and which can, as one insider put it, show him as a regular guy with pets, a family and is “a busy dude.’’

His office has accepted that there is no privacy in public life and his public appearances will be tweeted by others. Might as well climb on board, they say.

But clearly there is more to it than that and the suspicion is that there are internal numbers buried in one of those files that kept showing up in his pictures that indicate Harper has to loosen up a bit, lose the wax figure persona and give us a bit of leg.

In October, he crashed a wedding party for some pictures with the newlyweds. Wednesday morning, he opens part of his caucus meeting to reporters.

Last week, we had shots of him at lunch at the Prescott Hotel, a capital landmark known for its quart bottles of beer and meatball sandwiches, the kind of place the guys hit to unwind after a night at the rink.

Earlier in the month, he dropped into Chances R, a west-end Ottawa eatery partly owned by legendary junior hockey coach Brian Kilrea where he lunched with Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and a bunch of the guys.

We’ve seen him at the movies, with caucus members, watching Lincoln. We’re about to get his hockey history book — really.

Rebranding is a tricky business. Kentucky Fried Chicken can change to KFC and Kraft Dinner can become KD, but they are still fried chicken and macaroni and cheese.

Buttoned down is a bit like macaroni and cheese. It’s not sexy, but it has a reliable constituency.

But two years from now Harper might seek another term after nine long years in the job and reliable becomes risky. Are we watching the beginning of a (reluctant) rebranding?

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca

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